Football has a problem. Okay, a couple of problems. 

Foremost among them is the the game is now being perceived as too violent for people— particularly young people— to play. The revelations about the apparent effect of playing the sport upon the brain combined with its other attendant miseries to knees, ankles, shoulders and backs is threatening to turn parents against the sport.

Are you a millionaire athlete in a scrape with the police? Caught in a place where you shouldn’t be? Running from the law when ordered to stay still? Then dial 1-800- CRY-RACISM. You’ll experience a soft landing from a forgiving media.

When people you know do curious things, it’s always hard to reconcile the act with the person. I was thinking of that last week as the Hamilton Tiger Cats publicly lost touch with their senses, hiring a toxic former Baylor University coach to come repair their imploding team.

History, as Karl Marx observed, repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. 

For those playing along at home, we are knee-deep into an Oscar Wildean farce of professional sports. Saturday night, the Connor McGregor/ Floyd Mayweather bout was deemed a resounding success— mostly because it didn’t suck as badly as the pundits had predicted. 

Readers of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, might have been unsettled by the appearance this week of CFL coaches and players sporting t-shirts that declared Diversity Is Strength. Apparently, the CFL has adopted Justin Trudeau’s catch-all immigration slogan to celebrate the varied races, ethnicities and languages spoken by the players, officials and administrators of the league. 

We have seen the future, and his name is Denis Shapovalov. Okay, that might be an exaggeration, but the emergence of the 18-year-old tennis player on the national consciousness over a few steamy nights in August was enough to get the imaginations of Canadians racing.

Usain Bolt did not die on Saturday on London. It just felt like it. The greatest sprinter the world has even seen finished a straining third in his final race, the 100-metre final of the 2017 World Track & Field Championships. Two other guys whom history will forget made sure his swan song ended on a minor key.

These are the dog days of the baseball season. Which was probably appropriate as the Toronto Blue Jays howled like scalded hounds all week— umpire-wise.

Mid-July is not what we commonly refer to as basketball season. But the re-working of the NBA’s power dynamic seems to be encroaching on the turf of MLB and the NFL camps opening this week.

I was spinning hockey yarns with friends in the business recently, and the name Harold Ballard came up. The former owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs died 27 years ago, but the memories of his dyfunction are as sharp today as ever.

When I first went to St. Andrews in Scotland to play the Old Course, I arrived late on a Saturday afternoon. Upon arriving I tried to book a round for the next morning. “Ye canna’”, my host told me. “Tha’ Ol’ Coorse is closed as a park for the bairn and their kin”. 

There’s a story— probably apocryphal— about the notoriously fastidious German golfer Bernhard Langer. According to the legend, Langer asked his caddy for a distance on a shot he was about to make.